Hi guys,

Something I've been wanting to ask the community for years, but never
had the gumption, was about changing how we write our #= and #hash
methods, but now that we're combing through them anyway, I must!

Basically, it comes down to Proxy's.  I want them to work better in
Squeak.  But every time we put another send to #class or #== in an
implementation of #=, since those methods are inlined, they're too
brittle to work with Proxy's.  This causes hard-to-trackdown bugs in
applications and mini-messes to deal with them since the app is forced
to change its code to become "aware" of potential Proxy'iness of an
object before comparing it with #=.

This is no surprise, since writing a send to #== instead of #= for no
more than "performance" is actually breaking encapsulation in the
first place...

There is an easy solution.  When writing #= and #hash implementations,
use (#species or #xxxClass or #isKindOf: instead of #class) and #=
instead #==.  So, for example, Eliot, I want to upgrade your new
Message>>#= to something like:

= anObject
    ^self xxxClass = anObject xxxClass
      and: [selector = anObject selector "selector lookup is by identity"
      and: [lookupClass = anObject lookupClass
      and: [args literalEqual: anObject arguments]]]

Or #species or #isKindOf:, like we do in many other methods.  Now the
method is Proxy-compatible.

What do you think?